An Elegant French Family Enjoying the Outdoors on a Hand Fan Print

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(Cotsen 5363140)

I came across the above item while rummaging through a box of unprocessed prints. I was immediately struck by the unusual semi-circle shape of the paper. Then, I was taken in by the details of the image and what they could tell us about who this item was for and when it was created. Upon even closer inspection, I was delighted to observe that the image was printed with color, using a rare and time consuming technique.

The dealer who sold it to us believed (and I think correctly) that the unusual shape indicates that the print was intended for use as a hand fan. The outside curve of the print does seem to suggest this. But the shape of the print is missing some key features that we usually see in a fan leaf: namely a second, lower curve cut out of the bottom center (for mounting to a collapsible handle) as well as acute angles at the bottom edges. See for example this contemporaneous unmounted fan from the British Museum:

Fanology or Speaking Fan (London: William Cock, 1797). The British Museum, Museum number
1891,0713.508, Asset number 361519001.

The position of the image on the sheet may explain why our fan shape is inconsistent with other fan sheets. If a semi-circle was cut out of the bottom, it would have cut out a piece of the image! The image was printed, perhaps by mistake, too low on the sheet. This might explain why our fan leaf did not receive additional cuts to form a fan shape and why it was never ultimately mounted as a fan.

Though this print may have made a bad fan, it’s still a fascinating image which seems to illustrate a typical upper-middle class (haute bourgeoisie) family in post-revolutionary France.

The period dress suggests a date range around 1800 to 1830. The man wears breeches and a tailcoat, while his son wears a similar jacket but with ankle-length trousers suggesting a date around the turn of the nineteenth century when long pants began to supplant the popularity of breeches. The seated woman wears an “empire gown” with a high bodice just below the bust, so called by later English commentators because this style of dress became popular in France during the First French Empire (1804-1814). This style of dress began to become unfashionable in middle class and high society in the 1830s, when, In England at least, it was supplanted by hour glass Victorian dresses. Since this style of dress was popular throughout Europe, we’ll have to rely on another detail which suggests the country of origin.

This small book, which the mother is handing to her son, is inscribed “Télémaque”. This is a truncation of Les Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus) first published in 1699 by François Fénelon. It was written earlier as a didactic novel meant to instruct Louis, Duke of Burgundy (grandson of Louis XIV and second in line to the French throne) who Fenelon was tutoring. The novel follows Telemachus (son of Odysseus in Homer’s poems) as he journeys around Greece and receives moral tutelage from the goddess Minerva (disguised as his tutor, Mentor). As a thinly veiled rebuke of autocratic rule and by extoling peace and equality, the novel proved hugely popular into the the turn of the nineteenth century, especially in revolutionary France.

Other details of the print include recreations for well-off children typical of the period. The daughter clutches a dolly. A drum and a diabolo (a juggling toy) sit in the foreground on the right. A large Punch doll hangs from the tree in the background on the right. The implication here is that the family depicted is wealthy enough to afford leisure, having both the time and money to enjoy it, even for the children.

A harlequin doll resembling the character Punch, famous in British Punch and Judy puppet plays. In the early nineteenth century Punch and Judy plays were also extremely popular in Paris.

All of these details taken together suggest that our print was intended for an upper-middle class French woman around the turn of the nineteenth century. After all, hand fans at this time would have typically been used only by adult women in this class. If we examine the material production of the print itself, we discover further evidence of its high cost of production; suggesting that it would have been a costly item and a signal of wealth.

From the detail above (and the other images already shared) you can see that this print is special for its use of color printing. Intaglio prints of this period were usually printed in black ink only, and when colored, they would have been colored by hand with stencils. Hand-coloring is featured in this print, you can see it in places of continuous tone with flat color such as the shoes in the detail above. But from the detail, you can also see that that color printing has been used extensively. At this time (and continuing today), color printing was applied to intaglio prints using a technique later called à la poupée. Meaning “with the doll” in French, the “doll” refers to a wad of cloth shaped like a ball used to apply color to different areas for printing. This was a time consuming process requiring additional labor costs and material costs for more expensive color inks.

A la poupée inking by Bridget Farmer for her print “Pleasant Pheasant”. https://bridgetfarmerprintmaker.com/

Further, the print makes use of no less than three different intaglio printing techniques: etching, stipple engraving, and line engraving. Etching, the predominant technique, can be seen in the ample curving and wavy lines. Stipple engraving is the technique which applied all the tiny dots to the print, detailing the blue of the sky and other subtle details. Line engraving can be made out as well, characterized by straight lines with pointed termini, used to touch up and improve on the shadows and tonal qualities of the etching (a typical embellishment to etchings). Each of these techniques requires different tools and skills, indicating that a talented printmaker (their initials “D. Mo N.” are inscribed at the bottom of the print) applied considerable time, skill, and cost to create this wonderful print.

Clearly then, this print is a wonderful example of rare and skillful printmaking; but not without its technical mistakes! Our particular print was perhaps destined to never become a fan due to poor placement on the sheet. That it went unmounted, however, may have been serendipitous since lack of use probably preserved this piece of ephemera and spared it being discarded after wear and tear. Cleverly printed and luckily preserved, this print is a rare glimpse into upper-middle class French life at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter Imperfectly Remembered

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The original jacket by Helen Sewell.

On snowy weekends, details from The Long Winter, my favorite Little House book, often pop into mind. But I haven’t reread it for years,  perhaps because I wanted to remember the story as I thought it was.  But even a razor-sharp memory doesn’t retain indelible impressions of childhood favorites forever, so the last stormy weekend, the Library of America edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder came up from the basement.

For me, the story had been all about the relationship between Charles Ingalls and his second daughter Laura, and I can still call up ghostly images of Garth Williams’ illustrations of them haying in the shimmering summer heart and twisting hay into sticks in the freezing cold.  If Laura had been Ma’s little lady and not helped Pa with the haying, then the Ingalls family probably would have perished during the great winter of 1880-1.  The tomboy daddy’s girl seemed to be the most independent woman in the Ingalls family, being freer from gender role expectations than Ma and her sisters.  I hadn’t really taken in the extent to which Laura’s rebellious thoughts stayed in her head and how quickly she backed down when her parents—usually Ma—shut down outbursts with a few quiet words.

The neat division between the work of men and women was no surprise then, but resentment about the inequality between the sexes bubbled up now in two small incidents.  Pa had the freedom (weather and work permitting) to venture into town for news and company, but the womenfolk had to stay within the four walls.  The Wilder brothers weren’t facing privation in their warm, well-provisioned feed store.  It seemed unfair, even unkind, that Royal and Manzo fed the undernourished Ingalls stacks of buckwheat cakes, molasses, and fried salt pork when he visited, but didn’t send him home with a care package for the half-starved women in the semi-dark grinding wheat berries in a coffee mill for brown bread.  Perhaps that would have been a silent rebuke to Pa for failing to provide for his family.  Manzo’s wild goose chase across the frozen prairie to find a farmer with wheat to sell who might not exist did save the community from starvation until the trains could come through.  But now I can’t be sure if he hitched up the horses motivated more by pity for his neighbors or the desire to keep his seed wheat from them…

Then there was Ma, the upright Scotswoman, who taught school before she was married.  As a girl I wasn’t capable of putting myself in her shoes, even though it was obvious how hard it must have been to juggle childcare, housework, and homeschooling in the middle of the nowheres where her husband was happiest. Rereading The Long Winter during the pandemic forced me to recognize the remarkable equanimity she showed in the face of a likely death from starvation or the cold.  Making sourdough brown bread was not a fun activity to help pass the time.   Cleverly constructing a lamp from a dish, axle grease, a little scrap of cloth, and a button gave them a little light to read by when the kerosene ran out.   Admonishing her girls to be thankful for what they had still sounded prissy, but I had to admit from my experience during Covid that there is more strength in cheerfulness than in self-pity, both for your spirits and for those around you.  What was a  temporary toilet paper shortage, compared to keeping a small house holding six people, including one toddler, habitable during seven months of blizzards.

The Long Winter remains for me an extraordinary story of one family’s survival, even though I know for other people condemn it for what Wilder did not say about the effects the push westward had on the Native Americans in its path.  They point to the scene where the old Native American man comes into Fuller’s Hardware to warn the settlers in a dialect no one ever spoke that this winter will be the worst in decades, with seven months of blizzards.  In a 2015 blog post, Debbie Reece argues that such  scenes teach Native American children to despise themselves and non-Native American readers to hate indigenous people.   I have to admit to having forgotten this scene, but I am pretty sure that I did not think as a child that it was “true,” any more than the behavior and speech of  Native American characters in Westerns was.  It may have had something to do with  my mother who used to imitate the stilted dialogue to drive home the point that the programs were too ridiculous to watch.  Not having any familiarity with Native American individuals or knowledge of their cultures, there were no better ideas to replace the clumsy, disrespectful stereotypes.  Now that scene seems more awkward because it is so obviously constructed as a plot device.   The old man’s forecast was accurate, but presented as the mysterious knowledge of primitive people, and it follows the scene where Pa explains to Laura what his careful observation of  how thick the muskrats were building the walls of their houses might mean for the winter ahead..Rereading classics, especially ones whose reputations have changed, can be as important keeping up with new books.  It risks disappointment, because there is always the chance that the memories are better than the book.  The ones that hold up to repeated rereadings force us to test our memories’ validity and if necessary revise our interpretation in light of new things noticed and new ideas about its reception.

The hay that was twisted into sticks to heat the Ingalls’ house during the Long Winter.